The photographic exhibition Positive Lives: Responses to HIV challenges our most cherished concepts of life and death, writes HAYDEN PROUD
AWARD-WINNING South African photographer Gideon Mendel is the focal point and bridge between this country and Britain in Positive Lives: Responses to HIV, a ground- breaking exhibition which enables poignant comparisons to be made on the profile of Aids in each country.
The exhibition was conceived in 1990 by Lyndall Stein of London’s Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s largest Aids-support organisation. Working in collaboration with Network Photographers, a group of Britain’s finest in the documentary field (of which Mendel is a member), they embarked on the daunting task of recording the impact of Aids on ordinary lives.
The result stands as a “useful monument” to the courage of those who allowed themselves to be made visible. In the case of some portfolios, particularly Mendel’s on life in an Aids ward, the pictures are a testimony to the intense trust and bonding that took place between photographer and subject. Without this, their achievement would have been unattainable.
At the opening of the exhibition at the South African National Gallery, Mendel stated: “In doing this work I faced the challenge of making images which would address the pain and suffering caused by Aids, yet would not portray the people with this disease as ‘victims … I hope that my images will work against complacency and despondency, and inspire those who are fighting this virus to know that united efforts can make a real differance.” This exhibition seems to fulfil these hopes, but, as Mendel admits, it is only a
The idea of bringing Positive Lives to Cape Town was prompted not only by the presence of Mendel on the initial project, but also by the gallery’s desire to mount an exhibition on this subject. It was decided to commission Mendel to produce an essay on the South African situation, which would complement the British exhibition. The linking of the experiences of the two countries over four large rooms creates a profound sense of the meaning of the word “pandemic”.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, invisible but present in and behind the images on this exhibition, compels us to reassess our values, assumptions and cherished concepts. For all their seeming ordinariness, many of these photographs create an awareness that Aids is an event with profound ramifications. This tiny virus challenges our social structures and the very ways in which we think and perceive.
Freud observed that in our supposedly “civilised” attitude to death, we are living “psychologically beyond our means”, reluctant to admit mortality to the prominent position in our thoughts that rightly belongs to it. The same could be said of Aids. Like death, it’s something that always happens to someone else.
Edmund White notes in his catalogue essay: “Today people are so afraid of dying that they’ve decided only those with Aids will die … all those strange, marginal, ‘at risk’ groups can do that for us.” This is an exhibition that sets out to disabuse us of our misconceptions — those images of HIV/Aids in which we ourselves never appear.
White once commented that “if sex and death are the only two topics worthy of adult consideration, then Aids wins hands down as subject matter”. Judging by the record attendance figures at this exhibition so far, he isn’t far wrong. One visitor has complained that the exhibition seems to feast on a “voyeurism” about those with HIV or Aids. However, those motivated by morbid curiosity, hoping to see emaciated “victims” or images of dangerous sex, are in for a disappointment. Many of the photographic essays feature persons whose sero- status is unknown and irrelevant.
Perceptions are challenged, for example, in Denis Doran’s portrait series titled Sex: If Looks Could Kill. Here, the outward appearances of unconventionality in dress and lifestyle which would label someone as being “at risk” are overturned. In this series, it is not the safer-sex-conscious S&M dykes, queer boys and drag queens who are at risk, but rather the smug, suburban heterosexual couple who are in an open relationship and lax about using condoms.
Photography, as Roland Barthes shows in his essay Camera Lucida, is always about death, since it fixes the passing of the present and halts the process of decay called time. In Mark Power’s photo-essay entitled Grief and Loss, where groupings of photographs are hung in the form of a cross, time and memory are tangible themes. In two of these cross-configurations, the tragic impact of the death of a young gay man, Philip Langbridge, on the lives of his parents and his lover, is sensitively handled by resorting to the traditional conventions of the vanitas still-life.
In Mendel’s South African essay, the focus is predominantly rural and paediatric. His image of Jabu, an HIV-positive Aids educator on the Hlabisa Project in Kwazulu-Natal, evokes associations of the itinerant preacher, propagating the gospel of the condom so that all who believe may be saved.
Documentary photography is often heavily reliant on text to support its images, and this exhibition is no exception. Visitors have the option of texts in three languages, and the onus is on them to access context and content through reading. The rewards for doing so are high. On completing the odyssey, viewers may find themselves echoing the sentiments of a doctor who, writing of the polio epidemic in New York in1916, said: “We have learned very little new about the disease, but much that is old about ourselves.”
Hayden Proud is curator of painting and sculpture at the National Gallery. Positive Lives runs at the SANG until September 17, moving to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in November